Global CDN (content delivery networks) have been experiencing increasing demand of late as more and more organisations and website owners look to boost their website performance. Offering high speed networks consisting of multiple points of presence (PoPs) across several continents, these networks have revolutionised the way data is delivered around the world. By caching website data from origin servers to these globally distributed servers, end users are rerouted to the servers closest to them when requesting data. This results in dramatically reduced download times and latency rates.

One of the most popular CDNs is CloudFlare, a company that has recently taken steps to improve the reach of their global CDN. After announcing that 2014 was to be the year of data centre expansion, CloudFlare went on to double it’s footprint through the use of Equinix data centres. This will allow the company to keep up with the surging demand and increasing customer base and web traffic they are experiencing for their global CDN, which has seen a 400% increase in the last year alone. The increase now means that CloudFlare now processes more than 300 billion page views every month for a total of 1.5 million customers worldwide.

Global CDN Benefits

This new capacity has many positive implications for the company’s global CDN. Most importantly, by leveraging Equinix servers in North America, Asia and Europe, they now have access to 95% of the world’s population. Furthermore, over 20% of the world’s population is now 10 milliseconds from the nearest CloudFlare server, meaning that data delivery times to these people are sure to be blisteringly fast.

Speaking of their global CDN expansion, Joshua Motta, director of special projects at CloudFlare, said “Equinix has been a key partner to us every step of the way. No other company would have been able to help us scale as quickly as Equinix did on a global level. Becoming a part of the greater content delivery network ecosystem through Equinix and taking advantage of its platform and connectivity options, enables us to better serve our existing customers and grow our business within new geographies and industries.